“Everything Will be OK”, or ”諸事會社“ in Chinese, is a Augmented Reality installation. Adapted from Japanese word “株式會社“, which means “corporation”, the title of the piece replaces the first two characters with its homophone 『諸事』, which means “everything”. It’s a absurd joke hiding inside a serious situation.

The piece is made of two desk bulletin boards,「今日の営業は終了しています」(Business closed) and「冗談だ」(Just kidding.), a five-minute looping videos and a Unity app with AR camera installed. The base material of the piece is my own avatar. I let my miniature to be duplicated, stretched, disassembled, and re-combined into different kinds of functional objects:

Two “Tong”s become the minute and hour hands of a giant clock, slowly spinning on their own speeds. The two sometimes overlap, sometimes come face to face, as if the two figures are experiencing a twisted love hate relationship.

When audience scan the two boards with the Unity app, they will see the secrets I hide behind this reception desk: A line of “Tongs” gradually transfer from a full human body to a floor lamp, while keep bowing all the time in front of the board 「今日の営業は終了しています」. While in front of the board 「冗談だ」, a fan comprising dozens of Tong’s torsos is blowing away a huge “Tong”, whose head, legs, arms and torso are all separated but swinging in the wind.

”Everything will be OK” explores the concept of “Social alienation” by German socialist Karl Marx, which describes the estrangement(Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their Gattungswesen ("species-essence") as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.

Absurd, bizarre contents are displayed on the board with a formal, serious look and are hidden behind the virtual space that could only be seen through the lens of Augmented Reality camera. It’s just like the essence of life always hide behind mundane daily life. “Today’s business is over, which is just kidding”, the conversation on the two boards describes the struggle of being occupied by one’s “working status” at all time: People who are doing repetitively functional work are trapped inside the social order, the business of which can never be closed, not being able to obtain physical or spiritual freedom. Therefore we are alienated into the existence of non human nor objects.